Domain Spotlight:

nello.com

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And This Guy Wonders Why Warner Bros. Filed a URDP Against Him

This is a post I saw today on Acorn forums

Hello everyone,

Yesterday I received a spectacularly blunt email from lawyers representing Warner Bros notifying me of a UDRP complaint that they’ve filed against me for my domain thehangover3.com. A domain I registered in December last year (before the film had been announced) and have always intended to use. I know that they’re a multi billion dollar company and don’t have time for small fries like me but a courteous email would have been much more polite than a blank email with nothing but attached legal documents, but anyway.

I’ve read that the best course of action to take is just to ignore the lawyers and delete the domain, thus washing your hands of responsibility, but I can’t do that because a) on the request of Warner Bros, Tucows has frozen the domain, meaning no transfers or deletion can take place, and b) I first want to know if I have a chance of beating Warner Bros and keeping the domain.

So I’ve been swatting up on what a UDRP is (I didn’t know it existed until yesterday), the grounds on which my friends at Warner Bros have filed this complaint and also how I go about responding.

Unfortunately I seem to have shot myself in the foot by automatically putting a ‘for sale’ notice on this domain (it used to be my default holding page on all my domains) as it gives them good grounds to argue that I registered the domain in “bad faith” and that I only intended to sell it on for profit. However, if the film was actually announced I genuinely intended to create a blog about the film and get some organic traffic going rather than just going straight for a sale.

Currently I’m wondering if I should try and build my blog anyway and fight back on the following grounds (from the UDRP):

“you are making a legitimate noncommercial or fair use of the domain name, without intent for commercial gain to misleadingly divert consumers or to tarnish the trademark or service mark at issue.”

or whether I should capitulate and let them take the domain.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

tl;dr Warner Bros lawyers have filed a UDRP complaint against me and I’m wondering if I have grounds to fight or not.

Evidently he doesn’t read DNW. Unfortunately there are so many people that think this way.  “I registered it before the movie even been announced” .  The first movie and second movie had already been made and he still feels comfortable in his registration times.  AND he had it for sale.  Of course, accidentally.  It’s not a difficult concept, if you are trying for monetary gain based on the trademark or name of someone else you are probably in the wrong.  Every case is different but they don’t get much easier than this one.  I’m not buying the woe is me act.  There are a million ways to make money with domains but front running movies and typos of popular websites is to me, both wrong and lazy.

Aug 19 2011
Domain Spotlight:

nello.com

18 Replies to “And This Guy Wonders Why Warner Bros. Filed a URDP Against Him”

  2. This is why “legitimate domainars” get such a bad name in the public’s eyes. This guy thought he could win the domain lottery but unfortunately he just joined the “domain ponzi club”

  4. Since the term simultask has a live trademark assigned to Kyocera, perhaps the poster works for them? The actual domain shows a standard MFA splog on it though. Maybe it is indeed some type of weird inside joke? Dunno.

  5. Thanx for inviting me to explain it. As a successful businessman, I’m sure you have opinions on this!

    Multitask is a common term, yet studies found doing too many things at once causes “brownout” in the brain, makes you less efficient. http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2009/03/30/this-is-your-brain-on-multitasking
    Simultask is setting one task in motion independently, and you go on and do another thing. It is used in computers, first with AT&T in 1986:

    “Simul-task Technology allows today’s AT&T computers to apply their power to several tasks at the same time.” – How Today’s Most Productive PCs Help the Leader . . . and the Pack

    The Kyocera Echo™ offers a special mode of operation called Simul-Task™ Mode that lets you run two different applications at the same time, one in each display screen – for example, read email on one screen and open a text message on the other, check Facebook using the browser on one screen while looking through a photo gallery on the other, etc. – Use Simul-Task Mode on your Kyocera Echo

    so there is a definition in the Urban Dictionary, “If an electronic device has more than one screen and multitasks on both of them, it is Simultasking.”

    I’m working on DualScreenPhones, so I am into simul-tasking, but it isn’t restricted to dual screen. The new Galaxy Tab 10.1 with TouchWiz lets you multitask or simultask on the flat screen, so that Apple is blocking it in Europe, and wants to block Samsung’s phone as well! There is an iPad app which splits the screen – really nifty! It seems like Apple doesn’t want Samsung advancing in that space. Here is the iPad app:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pFNXwW5G_g

    It’s called the SlingNote. What Apple is doing to block Samsung is wrong, IMO.

    Now that I explained it here, I can copy and paste it into a template on the iSimultask dot com homepage.

    I think I would prefer Galaxy Tab 10.1 with TouchWiz than iPad. But if I were to purchase an iPad, I’d definitely need Slingnote! What do you think? I thought Simultask is a more common term than it really is, obviously.

  6. @ SL, Simultask 4.0 is the name of image analysis software: http://www.smithsdetectionpid.com/simultask.php

    so I think “simultask” is already a term in common usage. Kyocera trademarked the hypen, simul-task, as far as “mode” for its dual screen. ProxiCAD is the registrant of Simultask.com, which is displayed with a trademark symbol, but a search of “simultask” on USTPO shows the attempt to trademark the word was abandoned in 1994. I don’t think it can be trademarked.

    iSimultask, no hyphen, is its own term. In view of my development projects under way,

    http://www.DualScreenPhones.com
    DuoTask.com
    iDualTask.com

    and all my multiscreen domain names, plus SidebySide.tv, I have enough credentials in the space, so that the term iSimultask is trademarkable by me, which is why I intend to display it with a trademark symbol for five years, as required in the trademark process.

  7. I hope this fella didn’t contribute to the gene pool. Deleting the domain would not have helped at all.
    Even if he did manage to delete it, WB would have the right/option to have the domain restored anyways.

  8. movie companies never shell out for names. i used to do this sort of thing many years ago when i didnt know anything about domaining, and made at most $150 from big time companies

  13. Ahahahaha of course. The Hangover 3 probably isn’t something WB would be concerned about considering there’s already a Hangover 2. But it would seem he didn’t really know what he did considering he didn’t know what a UDRP was til now. Ohwell. it’s a learning process 🙂

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